Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

wasn’t released until that movie had been filmed. I had to go back to Cameron and Daly and ask if they’d be willing to postpone the Terminator shoot until the following spring. They agreed. I also cleared it with Mike Medavoy.

Compared to Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer felt like a trip to Club Med. We were shooting in Mexico, on a budget about equal to the first Conan’s, so there were great settings and plenty of money to work with. What was missing was John Milius, who wasn’t available to write or direct the sequel. Instead, the studio took a much more active role, leading to what I thought were big mistakes.

Universal had E.T. on the brain. The company had made so much money on Spielberg’s blockbuster that the executives decided that Conan, too, should be made into family entertainment. Somebody actually calculated that if Conan the Barbarian had been rated PG instead of R, it would have sold 50 percent more tickets. Their idea was that the more mainstream and generally acceptable the movie, the better it would succeed.

But you couldn’t make Conan the Barbarian into Conan the Babysitter. He was not a PG character. He was a violent guy who lived for conquest and revenge. What made him heroic was his physique, his skill as a warrior, his ability to endure pain, and his sense of loyalty and honor, with a little humor thrown in. Toning him down to PG might broaden the audience at first, but it would undermine the franchise because the hard-core Conan fans would be upset. You have to satisfy your best customers first. Who were the people who read Conan stories? Who were the Conan comic- book fanatics? They’d made it clear that they loved Conan the Barbarian. So if you wanted to make them love the sequel even more, you should improve the plot, make the story spicier, and make the action scenes even more amazing. Focusing on ratings was the wrong approach.

I made my opinion clear to Dino, Raffaella, and the studio, and we had our discussions. “You are wimping out,” I told them. “You are not being true to what Conan is about. Maybe you should get out of the business of doing a Conan franchise if you are embarrassed about the violence or what the character represents. Just drop it or sell it to someone else! But don’t go and make it something that it is not.” It was no use. In the end I was stuck with their decision because I was bound by a contract.

This time Richard Fleischer was the director. He’d been making movies in Hollywood for forty years, including some very memorable ones like Tora! Tora! Tora! and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It wasn’t his idea to make Conan PG, but at age sixty-six he was happy to have a job and was not about to argue with the studio or Dino. They told him to make the tone more comic-book-like, more fantasy and adventure, and use magic castles instead of the Nietzsche and the gore. On Conan the Destroyer, Richard was a terrific director in every other way, but he was adamant that we stick to those guidelines.

What made the film fun in spite of all this was the chance to work with Wilt Chamberlain and Grace Jones. Raffaella had picked up Milius’s trick of casting interesting nonactors. In the plot of the movie, a sorceress queen promises to resurrect Conan’s lost love, Valeria, if he will retrieve some jewels and a magical tusk. To help on this quest, she lends him her beautiful young niece, who is the only human who can handle the jewels, and the captain of her palace guard, the giant Bombaata, who is supposed to kill Conan once they recover the goods.

Bombaata was Chamberlain’s first movie role. Not only was he one of basketball’s all-time greats, but seven- foot-one Wilt the Stilt was also living proof that weight training does not make you muscle bound. He took a whole stack of weights on the Universal Gym and did triceps extensions with 240 pounds like it was nothing. On the court, from 1959 to 1973, he was so powerful and competitive that no one could push him out of the way, and I saw his athleticism in his sword fighting.

But the most interesting fighting took place between him and Grace Jones. She played a bandit warrior named Zula whose weapon is a fighting stick—with which Grace put two stunt men in the hospital by accident in fight scenes. I knew her from the Andy Warhol crowd in New York: a six-foot-tall model, performance artist, and music star who could be really fierce. She spent eighteen months training for this shoot. She and Chamberlain kept getting into arguments in the makeup trailer about who was really black. He would refer to her as an African- American, and Grace, born and raised in Jamaica, would just explode. “I’m not African-American, so don’t you call me that!” she’d yell.

The makeup trailer is a place on the set where everyone talks. If anybody’s worried about anything, that’s where you see it. Sometimes people come to the trailer and are comfortable, entertaining, and funny; other times they come in looking for an argument. Maybe they’re feeling insecure. Or maybe they have a lot of dialogue in the next scene and they’re scared, and then anything sets them off.

Some big celebrities have their makeup done in their own trailer. I don’t like to do that. Why would I want to sit by myself and not be with the other cast members? I always went to the makeup trailer.

There you hear every conversation that you can think of: concerns about the next scene, complaints about the movie, things that people have to work through.

It’s the mother of all beauty salons, because actresses, of course, have many more problems than the average housewife does. “Now I have to do this scene, and the scene is not clicking, and what does it mean?” Or “I got a pimple today, and how can you get rid of it?” The director of photography may have already told her, “I’m not a surgeon. I cannot get rid of a pimple.” So now she has a hang-up about that and comes back to the makeup trailer.

All this stuff comes out about personal relationships. You’re always torn when you go on location for two months or three months or five months, away from home, from your family. So guys complain about kids who are left behind, they complain about the wife who may be cheating.

Everyone schmoozes, and everyone chimes in: the actors, the makeup guy. Then the director comes, and he’s concerned about some actor’s frame of mind. Sometimes you see people naked, getting tattoos put on for the scene. It’s great for comedy and drama. But even for a makeup trailer, Wilt’s and Grace’s arguments were wild. I couldn’t figure out their hostility, but it was there.

“I’m not like you,” she would tell him. “I don’t come from uneducated slaves. I’m from Jamaica, I speak French, my ancestors were never slaves.”

The N-word was thrown around, which shocked me. Wilt would be saying, “There’s nothing black about me. Don’t give me this crap! I live in Beverly Hills with the white guys, I fuck only white women, I drive the same cars as the white guys, I have money like white guys. So fuck you, you’re the nigger.”

At one point I intervened. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, guys! Guys, please, this is a makeup trailer; let’s not have those arguments. See, the makeup trailer is supposed to be all about a soothing atmosphere, because you’re getting ready for the scene. So let’s not get agitated here.

“Furthermore, have you looked at yourselves in the mirror lately? Because how could you argue you’re not black? I mean, both of you are black!”

And they said, “No, no, you don’t understand, it’s got nothing to do with the color. It’s the attitude, it’s the background.”

The points they made got very, very complicated. They were not really talking about color, they were talking about how different ethnic groups came to America. There was something comical about seeing two black people accusing each other of being black. We laughed about it later, at the wrap party, and Grace and Wilt got along really well in the end. They’re both very talented, entertaining people. This was just an argument they had to have.

Mexico quickly became one of my favorite places to film. The crews were hardworking, and their craftsmanship on the sets was unbelievable. It was to the old European standard. And if you needed something right away—let’s say a hillside as a background for a shot—within two hours that hillside would be there, with all the palm trees or pine trees or whatever the shot called for.

Conan the Destroyer involved so much riding that it felt like the horses belonged to us even when we weren’t shooting. Maria would come to visit, and I would take her out on the horses up into the mountains. She is an extraordinary rider who’d grown up doing English-style riding and show jumping. We’d strap our picnic baskets to the horses, and we’d take out the food, the bottle of wine, and just relax on the mountainside, dreaming. We had nothing to worry about, no responsibility.

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When I came back from Mexico in February 1984, I was ready to start preparing for The